by Joseph Grady
“Oh, come on. Do you remember if she had any family?”
“Listen, that is all I know. Enough questions for now, let’s go feed the ducks.”
“But wait, no, tell me more about Ginevra. What did she look like?”
“She hated people who asked too many questions. Come on. No more being a bludger all day. Let’s get to work and feed the ducks. Stop faking. Your hangover is not so bad.” Virginia dug around in her purse, and handed a bottle to Lucy. “Here. You take one Panadol and you feel better. If not, later, we go and steal more powerful drugs from Martina.”
Lucy didn’t want to press her luck. She’d have time with Virginia later on. She let the topic of Ginevra go, took the pain killer, and got out of the car.
The ducks all flocked to Natasha, even after she ran out of bread. Lucy still had plenty, but the ducks hesitated to approach.
“Look, you bastards! I’ve got bread. Hers is all gone!” she hucked a chunk of her loaf towards Natasha’s feet, and the ducks scattered away quacking.
“You’ve got to be more gentle. They can tell your intentions.”
“I’m feeding the ducks with old ladies in the park. I want to give ’em bread! That’s my intention! What else do they need?”
“Yeah, but you must be giving off nervous energy or something. They can tell when you’re malicious and they can tell if you’re calm and friendly.” Natasha picked up the bread, and handed it back to Lucy. “Here, close your eyes and breathe deep. Pretend the ducks are your good friends.”
Lucy closed her eyes, breathed deep, and tried to imagine that her friends were ducks.
“Alright, now try and feed that brown one. Show him you’ve got a token of friendship.”
Lucy crouched down and crept towards the duck. The duck waddled away. She stood back up, “But this isn’t how I treat my friends. If that duck were you or Brian, I’d have just flung the loaf right at him.”
“Well, I don’t know. Perhaps you can’t succeed at everything. Are you feeling better, at least?”
“I’m feeling kind of drowsy, but really loose. Virginia just forced some kind of pill down my throat in the van. I guess it’s working.”
“Have you thought about the letter?”
“Yeah. It’s interesting. The night you searched my room, you found the fake letter that I wrote from the same,” Lucy used her hands to make quotation marks, “‘True heirs,’ right?”
“Right.”
“So how are we to know that this morning’s letter was from the true ‘true heirs’? What’s to say it’s not another fake letter from the true heirs?”
“It looks creepy enough to me,” said Natasha. “I don’t know if we have the luxury of not taking it seriously.”
“Well, let me throw this out there. One of us – me – has still got the keys, but the true heirs still have no idea which one of us it is. So we’ve got that over them. They still need us all alive, otherwise they don’t get what they need, for whatever reason they need it. They say they wouldn’t, like, risk killing one of us, until they could figure out, for sure, that their intended target doesn’t have the keys ... or the bank account numbers, because if they kill that person they’ll never get what they want. I guess they don’t even realize it’s not even a bank account they’re looking for, do they?”
“What about Andrew? They tried to kill him, didn’t they?”
“Somehow he must have made it too clear too soon that he doesn’t know what’s going on. I guess you’re right, they could eliminate him, and they tried unsuccessfully. Us on the hand… they need us.”
“So you’re saying we’ve got an advantage?”
“They’re the ones who’ve told us that.” Lucy pointed out across the pond. “They’ve told us they need us.”
“What are you getting at?” Natasha’s gaze followed Lucy’s finger.
“We’ve got wiggle room. Let’s screw with them.”
“Don’t we need to know who they are in order to... ehm... screw with them?”
“That’s exactly the point!” said Lucy. “They’re anonymous, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, then that’s the only thing we can screw with. We’ll screw with their anonymity itself.”
“Okay? I don’t know if I’ve ever screwed someone’s anonymity.” Natasha leaned her head back and looked down her nose at Lucy, suspicious of such a proposal. “You’ll have to explain what that entails.”
“No, I mean, gosh, come on, try and keep up with me for, like, just a minute more, okay?”
“I’m trying, Lucy, I’m really trying.”
“What if we didn’t show this morning’s letter to anyone else and wrote our own anonymous letter from the ‘true heirs,’ and delivered it to the servants’ quarters residents. It would say the exact opposite of the letter that you found this morning. ‘Don’t worry guys. We don’t need the bank account numbers anymore. We found them ourselves. You’re all off the hook. Carry on as normal. It’s all good. Have a nice day.’ They’ve obviously got some sort of inside guy. They’ll find out about the fake letter soon enough, and we’ll see how they react.”
“And what would that achieve?”
“We could draw them out. If they don’t have anonymity to fall back on, they’d have to identify themselves somehow. Prove their credentials.”
“Haven’t they done as much killing Eugenio and Cristiano?” said Natasha.
“Sure, but those were individual acts in the past, probably attributed to one person. But that’s the problem with being a killer who wants to remain hidden, while at the same time identifying himself. In order to get what he wants, he has to communicate. But he needs a name if he wants to communicate through time, with any continuity between his person and his acts, but he can’t use a real name. So if we rob him of his fake name, we rob him of his anonymity, and his power to communicate with words. We rob him of his anonymity, and he’ll be forced to use his real name to communicate.”
“How long do I have to live in this country before I start sounding so weird and abstract?”
“Three years.”
“I think I see what you’re saying. If it works as well as your plan to trap me in the basement, it sounds like a great idea.”
“It’s worth a shot.”
“I reckon it couldn’t hurt to try. I’ve got another idea, though,” Natasha suggested. “You might not like it, though. It’s awfully practical.”
“What’s that?”
“We go to the orphanage where Eugenio grew up, snoop around, and try to find out who his parents are. Eugenio was the illegitimate kid. So if we find out who Eugenio’s parents are, we can then find out who the legitimate kids are – the true heirs, that is, the killers.”
“Good God, you’re a genius!” Lucy’s mouth opened and she put her hands up on her head.
“You really haven’t thought of that yet?”
“No.”
“Anyways, it’s really great you and Brian managed to get Eugenio’s wife, Irene, to tell us where the orphanage is when you pretended to be South African embassy officials. Eugenio would never talk about it with me. I’ve e-mailed the principessa and asked for the use of the van next weekend. I’ve told her we want to take a weekend to do ‘team building exercises’ as a group. You, Brian, and I can head up to Varese and poke around a bit. I’ve already checked into the property. It’s not an orphanage anymore. It’s just a retreat center. But who knows, maybe we’ll find something.”
Lucy looked across the lake. It had been over a year since the last time she’d left the city limits of Rome. A weekend in Varese sounded like a trip to the other side of the world. She’d have to do a lot to convince herself over the next week, “Alright.” She took a deep breath, “Let’s go.”
The next Friday morning Lucy kept a death grip on the van’s steering wheel, hurtling down the Grande Raccordo Anulare (literally, the “Grand Ring Road”), the circular beltway that goes around Rome’s suburbs. The road was smooth and
well maintained, but always packed with massive semi trucks moving slowly, and miniature European cars zipping from lane to lane at high speeds. On the beltway, a nine-passenger van can’t throw its weight around like a semi, nor can it speed around like a car, so it requires a lot of extra stress to drive one in heavy traffic.
Scott was in the front middle seat, fiddling with the radio, jumping from station to station, changing every time he got bored in the middle of a song. Natasha scowled out the window from the front right seat. I was alone on the middle bench, and Andrew was on the back bench by himself, already fighting with sleep. The decisive moment didn’t come until they reached the northern tip of the Grande Raccordo Anulare, where the road flies up to an overpass. Every driver is confronted with a decision: you can either set out into the unknown, following the road sign to Milano, or return to the comfort and familiarity of Roma Centro.
For a long time the beltway had represented the absolute outer limits of Lucy’s sphere of activity. They passed a sign giving them one more kilometer before decision time. Now was the moment. The city of Rome — O Roma felix! — would be left behind for an entire weekend. Her pulse quickened, and she tried to ignore the road signs, but couldn’t ignore the very thin layer of perspiration forming on her neck and arms, which, given Scott’s vicinity, made her even more uncomfortable. She reached across to turn the heat off. It was already off.
“Isn’t there AC?” she asked.
“No,” said Scott, “But you can roll down the window.”
“Oh God no,” Natasha turned towards them. “We’re going far too fast. Open the windows and I’ll be sick.”
“I’ve never heard of that before,” said Scott. “I might be ready to believe the whole front seat thing, but you’re definitely making up the window thing.”
“Just leave ’em shut for now. I promise you, it’s not worth finding out if I’m lying or not.”
Lucy swallowed, stared ahead, and intensified her gaze. The Milan exit was now less than half a kilometer away. She took off her aviators, and put them up on her forehead. They merged into a line of cars headed up towards the overpass. The van rose. Lucy shifted down to fourth, held her arm against Scott, and then shifted to third.
The three were seated together, right next to each other, on the front bench of the tiny European van, leaving all of the middle seats and two of the back seats empty – except for me and Andrew, of course. When they first boarded the vehicle in front of Palazzo Mortimer, Lucy had refused to let anyone else drive. Natasha claimed that she had to have the front seat, otherwise she would get sick. Andrew staked out the back seat for himself, because he planned on sleeping. Scott said it was a terrible idea to let only Lucy and Natasha sit up front and navigate, so he squeezed himself into the middle front seat, a feature of most European vans. Natasha put up a fight, saying there wasn’t enough room, and that Scott would cause her to get sick. Lucy gave a very half-hearted objection, but in reality, was actually more than happy to brush up against Scott’s left arm every time she needed to shift, and feel her thigh against his every time she needed to move on or off the accelerator. She pretended the cruise control was broken and spent most of the time with her foot on the accelerator. Once Andrew finally fell asleep sideways in the backseat, it looked like three grown adults in a van had all chosen to sit up front, with six open seats behind. This would be a strange sight in America, but is actually not all that uncommon in Italy. Little by little, inculturation happens.
Once the exit ramp lifted above the normal street level, Lucy caught sight of the split ahead in the road and the two arrows – one pointed towards Milan, the other back to Rome. The traffic in front of them took off at high speeds, and Lucy should have accelerated and shifted up to fourth. But she lost heart and went to second instead.
I leaned forward from the middle row, “Come on, you can do this.”
The van decelerated even more.
“Lucy!” I yelled, “Come on!”
She turned back at me, “Well I guess I’ll just have to dive in. Live the tension, right?”
Scott and Natasha looked at Lucy with puzzled expressions. Lucy narrowed her eyebrows, tightened her grip on the wheel with both hands, and punched in the accelerator. She cringed and stared at the sign, willing herself so strongly to take the left to Milan that she forgot to shift. The RPM readout on the tachometer went way into the redline, and the van lurched back and forth. In shock, Lucy let her foot off the gas, too wired to remember the clutch. The van stalled. She kept her foot on the brake, right in front of the fork in the road. She was now full on sweating and breathing hard, the van at a full stop right in front of the fork. Every Roman driver behind them set off honking and yelling. Lucy heard nothing. Her mouth hung open and her eyes were fixed on the sign with the arrow and the word Milano. Scott reached behind himself, and put his seatbelt on, then leaned away from Lucy towards Natasha, not sure whether to make fun of her, ignore her, or if he’d have to say something out of character and encouraging. I put my paw on her shoulder, and she rubbed her cheek up against it.
“We got this,” Lucy told herself. “We got this. Sorry, guys, I think it just stalled or something. This thing’s old.”
She put her sunglasses back down on her eyes, turned the engine back on, glared at the word Milano, grabbed the stick, put her right leg back up against Scott’s, gently tapped on the accelerator, gradually eased off the clutch, and took the left fork for Northern Italy. In no time at all the van was back in fifth gear. Rome became a shrinking mass of apartment blocks in the rearview mirror, and the van plunged deep into open countryside.
The old Fiat hadn’t gone so fast in years. Lucy rolled down her window – Natasha didn’t dare object – and filled her lungs with non-Roman air. She’d forgotten the sweetness of breathing clean air. Leaning back, she left one hand on the wheel and let her hair whip around her head, while Scott and Natasha fought for control of the radio.
“Alright, everybody smile,” said Natasha, approaching the Umbrian border. She propped her phone up on the dashboard.
Natasha leaned into Scott and smiled. Scott stared down the camera without smiling. Lucy gripped the wheel and kept her eyes on the road.
“Shall we try another?” Natasha looked at the results. “I want to send a photo to tease Brian and show him what he’s missing out on.”
“Don’t mention that name again,” said Lucy. “Brian’s dead to us.”
In the days following the infamous story night on the terrace, whenever Brian saw anyone, he would turn red and find an excuse to leave the room. He had become so busy that it was hard to find him anyways. At a certain point, though, Natasha and Lucy finally cornered him, and explained their plan to go visit the orphanage. He hemmed and hawed, talking about work and school, but eventually agreed to come.
Unfortunately, when she finally did give her consent for the students to borrow the van for a team-building weekend, the principessa sent an enthusiastic e-mail to all of the residents, not just Natasha, wishing them a good time. Fr. Damien, of course, refused to come, but Andrew was immediately on board, and thankfully Scott, who was in the kitchen at the time they got the e-mail, insisted on coming along.
That morning, already twenty minutes after the agreed upon departure time, Lucy came tearing through the lobby, running with her carry-on pack. Brian was sitting on a couch.
“Okay, okay,” she said. “I’m here. Sorry. We can get going.”
She stopped by the door. Brian wasn’t getting up.
“I said we can go now. I’m here. Sorry.”
“I can’t.”
“What?”
“I can’t go. Work called. They can’t give me the weekend off.”
“What?”
“Work, Lucy. I can’t.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
Scott, seated in the front seat of the van, saw Lucy through the glass doors and started honking.
“I’m sorry. I can’t,” he said. “Anyways
, I already told you. I’m fine going to some retreat house, but I’m done with any of this...” he looked around the lobby, “investigation crap. It’s not safe.”
“Brian,” Lucy walked over to the couch. “I don’t think you understand. You said yes.”
“I said ‘yes... if I can get work off.’”
“I don’t give a shit about your word games right now. We need you. Like... we need you. Get in the van. Call work. Tell them it’s too late to cancel. This is not a discussion that I’m going to have with you right now.”
“Right. Discussion over.” Brian got up and moved towards the elevator.
“Brian, do you know how much you’ll regret it if something happens to us?”
Brian opened the elevator grate and got in. “You’re responsible adults. What you’re doing is risky as hell, but I have to trust you not to do something stupid. You’re a grown up, and you can make your own stupid decisions without me.”
“If you’re too fricking embarrassed to hang out with us, just because you made out with your sister and accidentally told us about – ”
“What the hell is wrong with you, Lucy?” croaked Brian. His mouth hung open and he looked hurt.
“I’m just... this is very... I’m just... I’m sorry about... no! What the hell am I saying? Screw you, Brian!” She reached into the elevator, pressed the buttons for every floor, and stormed through the lobby to the van.
The ride from Rome to the Umbrian border was as smooth as possible, given the circumstances. The large toll highways between provinces in Italy are extremely well maintained – even better than American interstates, not that Lucy would admit it, though – whereas all other non-toll roads are built with potholes already pre-installed. Lucy had always thought the van shook so much because of the Roman cobblestones. This was certainly a factor. But now, on smooth open pavement, the van could no longer blame its behavior on the roads. It was rickety and sporadic the whole trip. Crossing into Umbria, there was a loud bang from somewhere underneath the car, and the whole carriage shimmied.
Andrew woke up in the back seat, “What the bloody hell was that?”